Jennie Shortridge has written five acclaimed novels, including Love Water Memory and When She Flew. When she’s not writing or volunteering, she stays busy as a co-founder of Seattle7Writers.org, a nonprofit collective of authors whose mission is to promote literacy in their community. Somewhere in this busy lifestyle, she’s made time to create this wonderful little post about sex in her writing.

Sex and Love Water Memory

In all of my novels, I try to write characters that are as real as you, as real as me. This means that they have to have highs and lows, faults and talents, jobs, family, friends, and yes, a sex life! Even the disappointing lack of a sex life must be dealt with, as in my second novel, Eating Heaven.

In Love Water Memory, so much hinges on Lucie and Grady’s sex life, or rather, the question of whether or not they’ll return to it. They each have passions and desires, yet because of Lucie’s amnesia and Grady’s sensitivity to it, they miscommunicate time after time, leaving them each feeling misunderstood and frustrated.

When Lucie first realizes the extent of their previous sexual relationship after returning to her normal life with no memory, she is embarrassed that Grady knows her so intimately, better than she knows herself, that way.

When Grady realizes that Lucie is no longer that Lucie, he has his own very personal reactions to her, sexually. Who is this new person? Where did his old lover go? Will they ever feel the same about each other? It’s as difficult for him as it is for her.

And therein lies the deliciousness of writing about love and sex, and all of the mysteries surrounding it. I hope you enjoy how Love Water Memory unfolded as much as I enjoyed writing it!

If you could do it all over again, would you still choose him? At age thirty-nine, Lucie Walker's memory loss is caused by an emotional trauma she knows nothing about, and only when handsome, quiet Grady Goodall arrives at the hospital does she learn she has a home, a career, and a wedding just two months away.

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